Why Elon Musk's AI company 'open-sourcing' Grok matters — and why it doesn't (techcrunch.com)

submitted 8 months ago by ylai@lemmy.ml to c/fosai@lemmy.world

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[-] null@slrpnk.net 5 points 8 months ago

The term "grok" predates ML by decades.

[-] CeeBee@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

But that's not what they were saying. They simply said that the term "grokking" is a term in the ML world, so there is some precedence in naming a model "Grok" that doesn't directly relate to the "preexisting" term that loosely means "to understand".

[-] null@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

I mean, the term in ML is named after the original term, so it kinda does.

[-] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

My point is that using "grokking" in ML is not a Musk/Twitter/Whatever-his-Ai-company-is-named invention, it predates their use.

Yes the original researchers reused a pre-existing meaning, which has been in internet for a while before. I did not know it came from Heinlein and I did not know its full meaning. I remember seeing it first, more than a decade ago, in a text that explained without any explanation that an isolated unknown word can easily be groked from context. Demonstrating it immediately. To me (and I guess to those researchers) "grok" means "understanding from context" which is particularly appropriate in the context.

BTW Elon was not the only one to reuse this word. Another company named Groq, totally unrelated to Musk as far as I know, designs AI acceleration chips.